Centrist’s Journal: The last baby boomer

A man plays a game of Wii bowling at the Enfield Senior Center. Senior centers nationwide are making adjustments to balance the wishes of their elderly stalwarts with those of baby boomer newcomers.

A man plays a game of Wii bowling at the Enfield Senior Center. Senior centers nationwide are making adjustments to balance the wishes of their elderly stalwarts with those of baby boomer newcomers.

Photo: File Photo

Photo: File Photo

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A man plays a game of Wii bowling at the Enfield Senior Center. Senior centers nationwide are making adjustments to balance the wishes of their elderly stalwarts with those of baby boomer newcomers.

A man plays a game of Wii bowling at the Enfield Senior Center. Senior centers nationwide are making adjustments to balance the wishes of their elderly stalwarts with those of baby boomer newcomers.

Photo: File Photo

Centrist’s Journal: The last baby boomer

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I was born in 1956 to people with good genes. Could I be the last baby boomer? If I live to age 100, as my grandmother did, I will certainly be among the last — a generation dying, like World War II vets, by the dozens a day.

What will the world look like after the clouds of now ancient baby boomers have all left? Will the world have been better? Who will be in charge? Will they have saner and more pragmatic values? What will history say about us?

But this misses the point: Most of what mattered and was unique about the ’60s was what happened then. It was gaudy and garrulous reason enough. Or, as the saying goes, “If you can remember the ‘60s, you weren’t there.”

I was late to the party, of course, and followed my peers, not into idealism and protest, but debauchery and dissolution. Lots of both marked the whole affair, and that’s OK, too. If a greater and more sober generation gave us World War II and Vietnam, where is the moral failing in free love and pot?

Perhaps history will look more deeply at this divide: the conflict and violence somehow inherent in Western culture through the age of reason and industrialization, and the mysterious, unasked-for appearance of a different set of values — peace, inner exploration, brotherhood, a loosening of the rules that held people in, out or down. Perhaps we had it right: that love is more important than death and freedom better than obedience.

Say what you will. If you look at enough documentary footage of that time, we were certainly beautiful and numerous, a gypsy tribe inventing from Sanskrit books and psychedelics, from the currents of social justice and protest, a new way of being and relating.

Even if much of it was naïve or unsustainable — and it was — we can still thank the baby boomers for the enduring and committed change that has followed them: equal rights, feminism, gay activism, a continued attention to inequality and injustice. They were a generation that made, supported and continued much of the transformation of our society since the 1950s.

It didn’t hurt that we came of age during one of the greatest economic expansions in American history. Prosperity helps. Just as want and deprivation defined their parents and grandparents, plenty defined the boomers. We could rebel because someone else paid the rent.

Of course, those born between 1940 and 1960 were not monolithic in their beliefs, either. Boomers worked for Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and continue to divide into red and blue, and not prettily. That said, the indelible mark of our generation is progressive, inclusive and a challenge to the status quo.

So what happens now? What kind of values will come from an age of robots and flinty shareholders? First corporate decision making? If demographics are destiny, if values and social action come from them, what will America look like in 2050?

I’m optimistic. Baby boomers may have invented themselves, but they had a lot of help. From Kahlil Gibran to Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglas to Madame Blavatsky, boomers found inspiration and validation from a long line of rebels, explorers and nonconformists. We stood on the shoulders of the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day. We had backup.

Hopefully, we have made that heritage richer, woven deeper into American culture, anchored it in accomplishment and change. If another generation — the Xers, Ys and Qs of the future — can keep drawing from that same tradition, we’ll be OK.